Excerpts from two new film pieces

Tuesday 2/10/26

Both finished and filed this morning. Each are planned for the horror film book as well. This is how one of them starts:

Is there anyone who doesn’t recall their first love? For that matter, is there anyone who doesn’t remember precisely what the world looked like on the day they realized they’d never felt this way before and something deep inside of them would always be different now?

Horror fans are similar when it comes to their first movie loves. Almost all of us has a film we can point to and say, “And it was then that I gave my heart.” Horror inspires love, paradoxically more than it does fear. Love itself is scary. Anyone can leave us at any time they desire. No matter how well we think matters might be going. Death can take them from us. We may love someone such that this changes how we view everyone else, and life without them becomes an impossible struggle in contrasts. Love requires us to be vulnerable. Love doesn’t just happen. Feelings do, but love requires our every aspect, including our will, our effort, our setting aside of ego. Love isn’t for the faint-hearted. 

This is from the other:

The 1930s were an extended Big Bang for cinematic horror. Much of the groundwork for the popular cultural zeitgeist—monster-wise—was set down in big pieces courtesy of the genre’s under-the-big-top type of movies: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy. The 1940s had a bigger haul of films that will last so long as there are people intelligent enough to locate and experience them, but no horror decade has gifted us more in terms of prescience and wisdom than the 1950s, when science fiction became an essential aspect of the medium because it helped extend it further into the real world by understanding that that which is up on the screen could well be watching us for its own share of fright-triggered jolts.

Life is scary. Our thoughts are scary. Politics are scary. Those who serve—an oft-flimsy, disingenuous word in this context—as the leaders of nations—or, hell, your condo board—are scary. Horror was maturing in the 1950s, even when a movie like The Fly seemed to appeal most—on its surface, anyway—to ‘tweens, landing as it did thick in the middle of a child’s conception of “cool” and “crazy.”

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is another film of the same type of influence—and who among us doesn’t have extended periods when they feel two inches tall?—but The Fly feels like an opening into a world through which other films would proceed, like Dracula had been in 1931.

One could read it as a study in euthanasia, and of sufficient efficiency in that regard as to simultaneously make an intelligent case for it. Imagine that: The likes of this sobering, provocative, unflinching, merciful idea stashed away in a film whose initial target audience was friend groups of twelve-year-old boys hanging at the movie theater for a couple Saturday matinees.

Conceivably that’s projection well after the fact, a form of retroactive supposition, because when one watches The Fly and charts its measured progression, grapples with the questions it raises, and observes how its characters try to answer them, it’s hard to disbelieve that the movie wasn’t meant for all of us.

I am writing well.